Introductory Essay 2

Obviously, I Am Not “In the Beginning”, But I Do Have A Beginning

I have worked on, and thought about the concepts I am trying to outline in this book, for quite a while. History has always been my great love, and the study of “non-traditional” history has fascinated me, long before it seemed popular with others. For example, in my teens and early twenties, I spent years looking at the likelihood of “Pre-Columbian contact” and also loved both the concepts of Immanuel Velikovsky presented in “Worlds in Collision” and “Ages in Chaos.” Not that I accepted Velikovsky’s “absolutism” (that the planet Venus was a comet that came off of Jupiter and almost destroyed Earth) but I loved the challenge he presented to the, then, stagnant field of research. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky.

Even before these “youthful” explorations of history I had known, or rather at least heard about Ba’alism, from attending religion training. There I had heard of the tales of its great evil and that it was hated by God. However, I paid little attention to “what” was so hated, and soon concentrated my personal Biblical readings (what little I did) to Kings and Chronicles (the history), rather than to stories of rituals and of religious concepts per say. Even there in the books I read, I found that the conflict between God and Ba’al seemed to be that the kings of Israel and Judah were following Ba’al more than Yahweh, and the key issue for God was only “I am a jealous God.”

However, the more I changed my way of looking at history the more I was challenged by unexpected issues. For example, in the pre-Columbian contact theory, there were arguments raised that modern historians got their time tables wrong based on a first century misreading of Egyptian dynasties (another theory of Velikovsky)

Based on this exploration I began to consider the question of what it was that was so hateful about Ba’al in the eyes of God, other than just God’s “ego.” I began to see that it was also an issue of “rituals” and “beliefs” that was the main problem for God.

• There is a constant insistence in the Bible (both from God and the prophets) that the people of Israel do not go “whoring” after the foreign gods and that the people of Yahweh do not need to have their children “pass through the fire” in order to please God. These issues seem to be that which separated the practices and rites of the god of the Hebrews/Israelites/Jews and the peoples already in the Promised Land.

Yet, (at least in the Bible story line) for hundreds of years, if not more, the “chosen people” chose not to obey these commands concerning the rituals of other gods. Despite repeated warnings, and political and other disasters, (again based on the Bible stories) the people of Israel and Judea ignored the direct words of God, and the prophets, and did go “whoring” after the foreign gods and also did, in fact, pass “their children through the fire.” They continued to perform these acts:

• even after the incident at Mt Sinai (where three thousand were murdered for worshiping the Golden Calf, literally moments after being told by God “thou shall not kill”)
• even after the purging of the non-believers though forty years of wandering,
• even after failures in the conquests of Canaan,
• even after defeats from the newly arrived enemies, the Philistines,
• even after the defeat and death of Saul, and the repudiation of David by God,
• even after the separation into the two weakened kingdoms and the death of many kings “who did evil unto the lord” and
• even after the destruction of the Northern kingdom as a punishment from God, and the efforts to reform the Southern kingdom,

According to the Biblical timeline, some 800 years after God spoke to Moses at Mt Sinai, as the Babylonians are besieging Jerusalem, these people were still “passing their children through the fire,” or in other words, offering them up as human sacrifice. I say “these people” because as we shall see, “the Jews” is not quite the right term for them yet. The more correct term at this time is the Judeans.

• It’s also important to remind readers that there is little independent evidence to support the Exodus and the Hebrew conquest stories.

With all this in mind, we must ask what was so powerful about these Ba’alist practices that they had such a hold on the hearts and minds of the Israelites and Judeans? What does it tell us, that despite endless warnings and actual destruction, these rituals were maintained?

It occurred to me that the whole story of the relationship between the God of the “Jews” and Ba’al was not being clearly presented by the current “standard” presentation of history which, of course, is much influenced by the Bible. However, back in my younger years, say back in the early 1960′s, there was not much available to really look at the Ba’al religion, in the West that wasn’t extensively biased. It’s not that there hadn’t been much writing from an anti-religious point of view, it was just that the writings were simply not widely available.

The religion of Ba’al kept coming to my attention as I “matured” as a historian and I started to study the “Punic Wars”, (rooting for the losing side) as Ba’al was the chief god of Carthage. I also found the issue coming up as I studied the history of the Greek/Persian conflicts, as Phoenicia was a key “ally” of the Persians. This Greek/Persian conflict will play heavy in this work as it created the clash of cultures that impacted the development of many religions, but more on that later.

• For a somewhat different view of that Greek/Persian conflict and of what was called the Axial Age, see Gore Vidal’s Creation)

Again, in standard readings on the Punic conflicts, the religion and practices of Carthage was presented by the “winners” and, as the case with most winners, in not too sympathetic a fashion. While I questioned the two presentations (the Bible’s and the Roman’s) about the religion and the culture of those who worshiped using the rituals of Ba’alism, there was little readily available to provide me with contrary opinions.

Over the years, my thinking and my reading wandered into many areas, (mainly Chinese, Turkic and Mongol history) not often returning to the arena of the great rival of Yahweh. With my growing atheism and my rejection of the concepts of religious in general, there was certainty less to give me cause to directly reconnect to the study of the religion of Ba’al.

• To me, throughout this time, Ba’alism was just one of many alternatives of what appeared to me to be the same type of religion that dominated the “Near Eastern” (obviously a current Western term- sorry for its use) world, and actually seemed a minor replica of the far more important religions of Egypt and Sumer (and its successor states “between the two rivers”.) Ba’alism seemed to me, to be as it was presented in standard history, a minor side event of world history.

However, I was eventually introduced to a more neutral view of the “rituals” of Ba’alism in reading Flaubert’s Salammbo, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GustaveFlaubert Salammb™ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salammb%C3%B4%28novel%29 . In his story of Carthage’s fight for survival after the first Punic War, Flaubert presented the core of Ba’alistic ritual without passion or “modern” morals. He presented the “passing through the fire,” the process of human sacrifice, as a major and important fact of the “high” culture of the “protagonist” of the story

• So in his book, Flaubert had the “good guys” burning their children alive, and this act of “sacrifice” was presented as both “needed” and “good.”

To me, it was an insight into what was always presented in my formal and informal study of history, as perhaps the worst of the worse in human activities. God most hated the Ba’alist, the act of human sacrifice Ð the passing through fire,” and yet here it was seen as something that was perhaps “standard;’ and also something that was accepted in the most advanced of cultures for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

This was truly a “novel” concept, and its presentation in the novel was powerful (though perhaps not historically fully accurate). It helped to make something clear to me about my previous “simple” reading of the Bible – this action, this type of sacrifice, was what God was really angry most about – the passing through fire, the offering of burnt children to appease God.

The conflict over this type of sacrifice was perhaps the core conflict in all of the Old Testament and perhaps, as I thought about it more, a key to understanding many of the rituals and acts in not just Judaism, but in the New Testament as well.

• In the Bible, God and the prophets, for hundreds of years rejected the ritual of this Ba’alistic religion, this “passing through fire”, and condemned the Jews (again, not the right term yet) for using it. But use it they, the Israelites and Judeans, did. Furthermore, they continued to use it for centuries, right along with their chief rivals and powerful neighbors (the Canaanites/the Phoenicians).
• God made it a capital offense to go “whoring after these gods” and “to pass the children through fire,” but throughout the Old Testament, kings, heroes and commoners alike, continued to do so.

What I realized was that for all these many, many years, those who did these offerings of passing the children through the fire, did not see themselves as “doing evil unto the lord” but saw themselves as the “good guys,” doing what was needed and right to appease their gods, and meet the needs of their religious view of the world. And even though in the modern mind “correlation is not causation,” to the people of the time, it must have seemed that sacrificing their children to their gods was just, and correct, because it was those who sacrificed their children who seem to be most successful.

• In their own time, not looking backwards as we do now, but in their own time, people only needed to look at the great success and wealth of Phoenicia and compare it to the lack of success of Yahwehists to fully occupy the “promised land” or even control two remote, little kingdoms.

In retrospect, we do see how successful the Phoenicians were and (without religious bias) how unsuccessful the “Hebrew” states were. The Phoenicians seemed to “open the West” and control the trade of the Western world, and of so many nations. You might say they were the world trade center of their time. Furthermore, they flourished for what appears to be thousands of years. They planted colonies throughout the “new world” of their time, the Mediterranean Basin, with great success (Carthage only being the most successful of these). Truly, in the eyes of the people of the time, the Gods of the Phoenicians accepted their type of sacrifice (the passing through fire) and in return, blessed and sustained them, providing them with dazzling success in numerous endeavors.

The Hebrews/Israelites/Jews however, achieved little success. The great achievement presented in the Bible (the Davidic Kingdom) if real at all, was an ephemeral event, quickly falling apart after two generations. Most of the time (and this was a long time), the Chosen people were subjected to “evil rulers” and external conflicts, with many more defeats than victories.

• On the face of it, in their own time, the gods of the Phoenicians seemed to have been more successful in protecting and enriching their people than the God of Israel.

Even at the time of the fall of Judea to the Babylonians after a relatively short siege of a few months, the Phoenicians withstood thirteen years of Babylonian efforts to take their major city (Tyre) and after all that time, the Babylonians failed to breach the defenses of the city.

• Which god(s) seemed to protect their people best? The one who rejected human sacrifice or the one that accepted it? To the minds of most of the people at the time “correlation was causation.” At the same time, the people of Yahweh were being led into exile (again), the Ba’alist rituals seemed to work in protecting Phoenicia. To an impartial Ancient, it must have appeared that these rituals were also helping the Phoenician world, expand through Carthage and its other colonies.

As I was beginning to look at these religious conflict issues in this new way, my curiosity wandered to other things (mainly my career in public service and the history of persons with disabilities to name a few things). I did not follow up on the images and concepts presented in Salammbo. Even in my studies of history, I was looking at too many other aspects of “war and peace” and less at changes in religion.

• However, the idea that “good guys” could perform” human sacrifice remained with me as a compelling concept.

Two different pieces of comic art, seemingly unconnected to Ba’al, pulled me back to looking at this religion again. The first was Mel Brooks’ “History of the World Part I” with its amazing scene of turning the torture chambers of the Spanish Inquisition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition into a musical routine that was a tribute to Esther Williams and Busby Berkley. (In the scene, Brooks has the unbelievably funny line, at least for a historian, of “Torquemada, Torquemada, Oy, you can’t Torquemada anything”). The other work was Leonard Bernstein’s adaptation of “Candide” into a musical. He had the equally amazing song in his play of “Oh what a day for an Auto de Fe” mocking rituals used in the lead up to the burning of heretics.

These two comic efforts to remind the world of the horrendous repression of human rights (sorry for using a modern term again) and enforced social conformity, led me to explore the use of terror in the Catholic Church (not an easy subject). It also led me to think about why the Church in Spain used the method of burning at the stake in such large numbers (perhaps as high as 30,000 or as low as 3,000) as opposed to just torture and publicly humiliation or other forms of execution. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodefe )

• As you can see from the range of the figures, there is great dispute over the actual numbers killed through the work of the Inquisition. For a view of this conflict see both http://www.newscholars.com/papers/Killing,%20Christianity,%20and%20Atheism.pdf and http://biblia.com/christianity/spanish.htm,)

I asked why was this particular form of execution (burning alive) was so favored in this area of the world, when it was far less used in the “East.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executionbyburning While looking at Spain, and its use of burning, the trail of investigation led to other massive efforts of repression in Western history, namely, the Church’s imperative of social and religious conformity, and the repression of women through the use of “witch craft” accusations. Here I found that once again, burning was not only used, but was also the preferred form of capital punishment (with hanging or drowning as the other main options). Once again, the numbers of how many were killed by burning or other means are in dispute. Over a 250 year period (1450-1700 AD) in Western Europe, the low estimate is that some 12,000 women were killed for witchcraft, with the higher estimates reaching up to 100,000 or more, (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witchcraft and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt).

I began to postulate the idea that the use of this type of killing, this burning of people, was routed deep in the social past of the societies. The two peoples that had used burning as the main means of human sacrifice were the Celts, who peopled all of Western Europe prior to Roman, and later German domination, and the Carthaginians, along with their “parents,” the Phoenicians. Between these two often closely allied cultures Spain was dominated for almost a millennium. Furthermore, the Phoenicians appear to have been in Western Europe long before the Celts arrived, and seem to be the major influence on the culture and religion of the Celts. I wondered if Celtic traditions such as the “wicker man” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicker_man was also connected to their ancient and forgotten connection to this religion of the Bible, this most hated of all religions of God.

• So I asked myself if Ba’alism was perhaps the “origin” of the means of execution preferred by the Spanish Church, as a practice which lay deep in forgotten (and repressed) social/cultural history of the Iberian region. Was the Auto de Fe, and the burning of persons to appease an angry God, actually Ba’alism in a new and different form, under the guise of a new religion? I also had to ask if the burning of women for witchcraft actually is closely related to the Ba’al religion, too.

From my previous study of culture, I have come to realize that despite all forms of repression, elements of ancient cultures continue to be manifested in the “new cultures.” For the most part we find that cultures actually “morph” rather than die. Here, in the Auto de Fe, and the witch trials of Europe, I thought, I saw a connection, a “morphing” with a long forgotten religion. With my usual curiosity into the uncommon, I began to look, and found far more than I expected.

• A great deal of what I have found was not, and still is not represented in “standard history” and the effort of this work is to at least ask the key questions that may lead to a changing of “standard history.”
• There appears to be a general failure to make reference to the use of human sacrifice in the study of western tradition by what I refer to as “standard history.”

While Velikovsky appears to be was mostly wrong about his concepts of how Venus was created, he did bring about a look at the idea of “Worlds in Collision” which led us to greater understandings about how dinosaurs died, and the actual presence of the “Nemesis comet” http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/lbl-nem.htm and http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/extinctions-nemesis.html . So perhaps my efforts will not show that there is that major cultural link between the “passing through the fire” and the Auto de Fe, (Bull fighting in Spain is a vestige of Phoenician or Cretan cultures and perhaps even older than the religion of Ba’al). This may only lead to a greater understanding of what was once considered right and proper and the acts of “good men.” It also may just lead us all to a better understanding of the greatness of the Punic peoples and their major contributions of world culture and history. My theory of the influence of Ba’al on the executions favored in Spain may prove to have some merit, though and perhaps others can more fully explore this relationship. I might hope that this point supports the greater overall theory of this work, which is:

• The Religion of Ba’al was not just a minor duplicate of other Near East religions, but was, and still is, a major influence in the overall development of our current concepts (in the West) of both good and evil.
• It had great influence on the early actual development of Christianity and its views of salvation, and how Christians envisioned the “devil” and “damnation.”
• The Ba’alist religion and its beliefs and rituals went far beyond the Inquisition of Spain, influencing how the inhabitants of the New World were viewed by the Spanish, and so much more in modern history.

These books present the premise that this very ancient religion, one that is much older than the beginnings of Judaism and thousands of years older then Christianity did not simply go away it morphed into our current religious views.

The term “morph” is the shortened form of metáaámoráphose which means

• To change into a different form, substance, or state: convert, mutate, transfigure, transform, translate, transmogrify, transmute, transpose, transubstantiate. http://www.uphoenixdegrees.com/index.cfm?key=gobookkeepingbase&v=google&a=uopbusiness%2540worldclassstrategy.com&c=accounting&cat=bookkeepingbase&mt=Content&ad=502127334&st=bookkeeping%20definition&pmode=business&est=bookkeeping+definition&emt=exact

We now, thanks to modern understandings, can track how and why Ba’al morphed. Though invisible to academics for centuries, I believe its influence is still all around us.